Neutralization of the Effect of Hardware Trojan in SCADA System Using Selectively Placed TMR

Abstract

Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are the primary technology used to automate our critical infrastructure and major industries in order to improve their efficiency. Their dependability is challenged by probable vulnerabilities in the core computing system. These vulnerabilities can be appear on both front (software) and back (hardware) ends of the computing system. While the software vulnerabilities are well researched and documented, the hardware threats are normally overlooked. However, with hardware-inclusive technological evolutions like Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things, hardware vulnerabilities should be addressed appropriately. Hardware Trojans are malicious alterations in the systems that leak confidential information or disable the entire system. In order to achieve a countermeasure, we propose to neutralize the effect of Hardware Trojans through a Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) based methodology. In order to address the inevitable overhead on area, TMR will be implemented only on select paths of the system i.e., equally probable output paths which are found vulnerable to Trojan placement. In this work, we propose to neutralize the effect of hardware Trojan based vulnerabilities in SCADA systems, with the use of selectively placed TMR methodology.